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- - Junk email help (https://www.talkofthevillages.com/forums/computer-questions-92/junk-email-help-326495/)

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensurconnect@gmail.com (Post 2031558)

It is never a good idea to connect to an open wifi you find even if it says McDonalds or Hilton-Guest. For a few hundred dollars a bad actor can buy a small device that advertises a fake wifi signal that you connect to. You think everything is ok because they pass you through to the real open wifi. This is called a man-in-the-middle attack. Every username and password you type in can be captured even if it is a strong password.

With Gmail, you can setup two factor authentication (2FA) which is using your password and something like a text code to your phone or better yet is an authentication app like Google Authenticator app. Without both, no one can login to your account.

All of this security is free. I know it is easier to just use just a password and usually the same password for multiple logins, but you set yourself up for a problem sometime in the future. A little inconvenience now, will save you a ton of inconvenience in the future.

Good advice, which almost no one will use.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensurconnect@gmail.com (Post 2031558)

It is never a good idea to connect to an open wifi you find even if it says McDonalds or Hilton-Guest. For a few hundred dollars a bad actor can buy a small device that advertises a fake wifi signal that you connect to. You think everything is ok because they pass you through to the real open wifi. This is called a man-in-the-middle attack. Every username and password you type in can be captured even if it is a strong password.

With Gmail, you can setup two factor authentication (2FA) which is using your password and something like a text code to your phone or better yet is an authentication app like Google Authenticator app. Without both, no one can login to your account.

All of this security is free. I know it is easier to just use just a password and usually the same password for multiple logins, but you set yourself up for a problem sometime in the future. A little inconvenience now, will save you a ton of inconvenience in the future.

I agree with most of your post except the bolded. If you are on a secure connection to a website via https, no one is snooping on your link even on an open wifi connection. Gmail, every bank, and in fact every real website uses security certificates.

Could they use wireshark and read the packet header to see what site the https request goes to? Sure. Not much they can do with that information. It's just encrypted garbage after that point.

I just got up at 9:30 and just for fun while having coffee I counted my junk mail there were 137 and 9 in my Gmail I knocked the 9 out of my Gmail then thrashed all the junk mail with one stroke , maybe took all of 5 seconds, people see a problem , where there is no problem FYI if by chance a legitimate email was in that mess so be it , it couldn’t have been very important because I didn’t miss anything I should have received

Quote:

Originally Posted by turneronce (Post 2031246)

I am the original poster. I am 100% sure that I have not given my address to a suspicious entity. I recently traveled and used the hotels' unsecure wifi to check my emails. Of course I don’t use those wifis for sensitive issues, but can email be hacked in those situations?

If you look at any site such as Amazon, Sam's club, etc, Then your info saves to your cookies. And then it goes out to the whole world to use...
:ohdear::ohdear:

Only mail i get nowadays is junk mail

If you buy your own domain name through a low-cost registrar like Namecheap, you can get inexpensive email from them that includes a very powerful spam filter at their server level, so it never reaches you. Then you can log in to their server and exclude all the additional sender addresses you want to and those will never reach your desktop email either. You will need Outlook or a similar desktop (“client”) program to download your email to your desktop. And you will have your own domain name forever as long as you pay the monthly fee. For example, if your name is Sally Smith you could buy a domain name like Smith-Florida.com and set Sally@Smith-Florida.com as your email address and get very little spam even if you mistakenly gave your email address to a spammer. My email address has been published on my website for over 20 years, and when I was working my site had many pages and got around 200 visitors per day, but using my domain name email, I get almost no spam and never have.

Quote:

Originally Posted by retiredguy123 (Post 2031055)

Why not get another email address, and notify the people who you want to have it?

Exactly:coolsmiley:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael G. (Post 2031342)

I am doing the same thing.
I set up a new email only for financial/banking/utility's sites and no spam or junk mail.

One question:
Should I be deleting my spam folder in my old e-mail in Gmail or leave it build up?

some email will automatically delete spam files after 'x' amount of days. i think you may be able to control how many days

Quote:

Originally Posted by su2009 (Post 2031985)

If you are willing to spend a little more time setting things up you can get a personalized domain (about $15 per year) and then set up multiple email accounts using that domain which all forward to your regular (primary) email address that you only give to friends. That way you only have to check one email account.

For instance, you could set up banking@your_domain.com and use that one for your various banking and brokerage accounts, shopping@your_domain.com for retail accounts, etc. If one of them started to show up on a large amount of spam you could delete it and create a new one for those accounts (i.e. bankaccts@your_domain.com) That way you won't have to change your email account info on too many online accounts at a time.

OR you can just skim the messages in your junk folder once a day to make sure nothing legitimate is in there and then delete them all. As Charlie said, it only takes a few seconds.

k.